So I finished up my Eastern European online film festival. One thing that's very noteworthy is seeing how fukking bleak the consequences of the Yugoslav wars of the 90s were on the region. Every film I saw dealt with it one way or another (some more overt than others) but all of them have the same defeatist outlook on post-war society regardless of the country the film was made in or the nationality of the filmmakers.
Drama about a 9 year old boy in the Croatian highlands some time after the Croatian/Serb war. Aga sells cigarettes and weed to make money to search for his father who disappeared in the war. He lives with his mother in a house with four other women. The women are as different as they can be and some of them can't stand each other but for different reasons they had no other place to go after the war. When one of them tries to commit suicide the boy enlists a local man, the resident piece of shyt, to take her to the hospital. It's a very talky film, shot almost documentary style and mostly focusing on the strange atmosphere within the female-run house where the women of different backgrounds and interests constantly throw verbal jabs at each other while carrying their own scars from the war.
Nika is serving time in a youth prison after taking the fall for a crime committed by his gangster brother. As a reward he is made head of the gang within the prison. He maintains straight forward discipline but when he is ordered to start preparing for a riot, a program is started to teach the prisoners rugby and some new faces arrive, he slowly starts to lose grip on his crew's loyalty left and right. What works here the most is the unspoken realism. There's the cold hard acceptance of the past being lost and no future set out for them. They don't talk much about anything and all quietly move to assure the best position they can find within the borders of the prison ecosystem. It's grimey because it doesn't lie about their odds and that's why it hits so well. The title of the film says it all, as explained by a character teaching Nika math:
'Negative numbers are unique. They exist like every other number but at the same time they don't because they have a worth less than zero'.
A police officer is forcibly called into his job on the night his wife is expected to deliver their baby. Monitoring the halls of the police station, having strange encounters with colleagues and prisoners alike, he is confronted with the brokenness of the society he will have to raise his child in, and starts deliberating on what his role should be. It walks the line between being very direct about some topics and very metaphorical about others, making it sometimes difficult to follow what place certain characters hold in the story, but it adds enough to the fever dream-ish atmosphere that even in its more obvious steps the film remains intriguing enough.
Not sure if
The Son (its international title) is a direct translation of Sin in Bosnian but if it is it might be the only clever thing about this failed family drama. 17 year old Arman was adopted as a child. After a disastrous reunion attempt with his biological mother he grows more and more angry and aggressive on his surroundings. In the mean time we see that the parents and their biological son are hardly model citizens either as they stand by idly unable to understand Arman's feelings of being abandoned. Where the film fails first and foremost is that there's no clear arc, not even to its titular character. It builds conflict upon conflict but there's not a single consequence to be seen even as the situations grow wildly out of control (gone off alcohol and coke, he hijacks a tram with his friends and crashes it into a car, after which he's only seen being reprimanded by his parents at a dinner table despite the three separate criminal offenses). As a result it doesn't build to anything, just showcasing teenage anger over and over until it ends at a place that feels entirely arbitrarily picked. The film could've ended 10 minutes or even 20 minutes earlier and it would not have mattered. It certainly doesn't help that the actor playing the lead is horribly miscast, not in sense of performance since he actually seems somewhat talented, but because he's clearly at least in his mid-20s looking like a grown-ass adult fashion model straight out of a CW show. It makes it completely impossible to take him seriously as a 17 year old outcast who's suffocated by his own anger and it detracts even further from what's already a difficult film to get into.